a painful election is behind us. now the hard work begins. creating middle class jobs. it used to be a ticket to the middle class was by making things. but what are we making these days, and where is the middle? take a minute to look around your living room. your tv, the jaens you're wearing, the lamp next to you, all of those things likely aren't made in the usa. it's a trend, of course, long in the making but made worse by the great recession. when more than 2 million manufacturing jobs were lost. since june 2009 when the recession ended, just 241,000-of-those manufacturing jobs have come back. that's according to government data. for years, for years, conventional wisdom was we don't need to make stuff here. we'll invent it in america and then become a service-based economy. well, here we are, and these new service sector jobs aren't paying off, literally. right now a job in the leisure and hospitality sector averages $13 an hour. that's $27,000 a year, if you work full-time. retail, not much better. average hourly rate, about $16 an hour. this is the average. it tak